Playground, page 36
Someone shouted, “Ask the robot!”
They did. Profunda said, “If all goes as planned, the investors will begin to send inspectors by the end of next month.”
No one wanted to go home. The whole island had turned strange. Since almost everyone was still there, they decided it would be the easiest thing in the world to cook dinner. And so they did, with the evening fluctuating between celebration and wake. There were no fights and few real arguments. No one knew quite what future they had released. But the food was superb and there was plenty of good music—a small, tightly harmonized ensemble sing-along that would soon be a thing of the past.
THE MORNING AFTER MAKATEA’S farewell party to its old self, Palila Tepa woke up thrilled from a vivid dream. Awakening, the first thing she did was to test her dream to see if it could hold up in the spotlight of full consciousness. It could and did. The thought of the consequences set Palila Tepa laughing again.
This is why I am still their Queen, she told herself. And her Self agreed.
After a triumphant breakfast of pu’a rôti heaped up with papaya and mango, she paid a visit to the tāvana. She found him in the Town Hall, at his laptop, holding a dazed conversation with Profunda that had gone on all night, judging by the mayor’s hair and beard.
“Chief,” the Queen said. “Mind if I ask the robot something?”
“He’s not technically a robot. He’s really a—”
But the Queen scooted the mayor over before he could finish. She spoke slowly into the machine, as if to a non-native speaker. “Please tell me how many square meters of buildings will be built in this so-called pilot project.”
Profunda laid out the dimensions and footprints of each, in all the detail that Palila Tepa wanted.
“Thank you. And where, exactly, will each of these buildings be built?”
Profunda presented the architectural sketches and maps that so many islanders had already pored over.
“Fine, fine. And who owns the deeds to these parcels?”
The machine lapsed into thought. Didier’s eyes widened. When the artificial intelligence spoke again, the human intelligences already knew the answer.
“The question of land ownership on Makatea is complex. Much real estate was abandoned after the closure of the mines and the collapse of the economy half a century ago. But long before that, the property records had fallen into confusion. The French only ever made one serious attempt to collate a list of plats and their owners, and they never updated those records as individual owners died and their heirs laid claims. There may be as many as ten thousand Makateans and their descendants living abroad with valid claims to the island’s land.”
“Thank you again! And what do you think outside lawyers might say about these plans to build on land where ownership is uncertain?”
The world’s most expert lawyer thought for a good three minutes before replying.
“This would make development very difficult.”
Didier said something soft and vile, quickly apologizing to both parties.
The Queen said simply, “Hé hé hé!”
NEWS OF THE NEW CHALLENGE spread through the island in an hour. That evening, without being summoned, several dozen people showed up at the community center to volley with the fact.
“We’ll have to have another referendum.”
“One that includes thousands of people abroad?”
“That isn’t happening.”
“The President is fed up with us. The French are shaking their damn Gallic heads. They will decide this however they want to.”
Manutahi Roa had taken down the big-screen monitor, but the broadband channel to Profunda was still open.
“Ask him. Ask the robot.”
“I’m not really a robot,” Profunda said. Then he added something that blew that camp meeting wide open. “Many of your questions can be answered directly when Todd Keane reaches Makatea.”
A shout went through the assembly.
“Wait,” Manutahi said. “Wait. Wait. This man is coming here? To this island?”
“Yes,” Profunda assured the humans. “He’s making the journey from California in his self-piloting yacht.”
All eyes turned to Rafi Young, as if he were responsible. The American stood still with his hands at his sides. His own eyes closed and his features relaxed from fury into confirmation, as if he finally grasped the nature of the game.
........
IF YOU’RE WONDERING WHERE I’VE BEEN these last few days, the answer is hell.
It started when I got lost on the second floor of my house. I’m hardly a stranger to getting lost. It’s all I do these days. I get lost on my own street, lost in my backyard, lost in my own house. But this time was different. I lost the house itself, even while standing inside it. I lost my own sense of self, along with all idea of what kind of life I could possibly be living in so alien a place.
Some days before—don’t ask me how many—I walked into the downstairs bedroom to get my cell phone. On my dresser, I keep a framed print of a photo that Ina took of me and Rafi playing Go outside on the Quad at Illinois, the last year that we all talked to each other. I picked it up to look at it for the first time in years, and another world blazed into my head.
All at once, there were a hundred things I had to tell you. I set down the framed photo and picked up my phone from the bedstand to start up a conversation with you. When we were done, I slipped the phone into my pocket and proceeded to wander around the room for another several minutes, telling myself that I knew I had come in here for a reason. Forgetting to remember that I’d already remembered what it was that I had forgotten.
The distress of losing myself in that maze set me on a jag. My diagnosis was only four months old. I saw what the months ahead held, and I spun out into a dark place. I wanted to be done.
The docs had been playing with my meds again, a push-your-luck game where nobody could calculate the risks or even keep track of the running score. And maybe I’m not the most attentive or compliant patient to begin with. Whoever was at fault, some combination of dosages went haywire, and I fell asleep for twenty-one hours straight. Waking up, I proceeded to stay awake for the following thirty-five. It’s a Lewy body thing. May you never really understand.
Two days later, I was finally able to fall sleep again. My REM behavior disorder was already getting worse, but the latest whacked-out sleep schedule landed me in the deep end of delusion. It wasn’t like I was dreaming. I was inside the past once more, my body physically acting out those scenes again as I slept.
In my sleep, I tried to keep up with the two of them as we biked to the lake. Because my eaten-away brain no longer arrests my sleeping body, I managed to scissors-kick my way out of bed and onto the oak floor. I cracked an elbow, lay there forever in excruciating pain, then crawled into bed again. This time, I woke up screaming at Ina not to deface her sculpture with blue paint.
The terrorist commandos inside my brain were snipping off the connecting cables between cells and pulling out handfuls of who I am. Somewhere in the next gauntlet of sleeplessness, I walked up the stairs that I’ve walked up millions of times before, and there, at the top landing, Lewy put his arm around my shoulders, and I vanished again.
Was it terrifying? I suppose. But in that state, terror is just another painting hanging on the wall of a museum so huge, dark, and shot through with jumbled rooms that no single painting can hold my gaze or have much power over me for long.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO LAST NIGHT, the one experience in this whole Lewy body haunted house that I most need you to understand. I was lying in bed in the upstairs bedroom, the one with the west-facing window. I’m increasingly afraid of falling, and the bed is one of the safest places left, if I can make my way upstairs to get to it. I nestled in the crater that my body made in the mattress’s memory foam. My limbs had gone through a storm of agitation late that afternoon, and the onset of stillness felt like the skies clearing.
But there was still a whole evening to get through. I needed to listen to or watch or read something. But I couldn’t lift my arms or raise my torso. I couldn’t even want to. That seemed okay, then not okay, then okay. I lay on top of the percale bedcovers, my brain going over its sole mantra of the last few months: “Fluctuating cognition, fluctuating cognition . . .” It was a way of reminding myself that I’d be back, eventually. But that fact was becoming less certain and less comforting.
It blazed into my head as clearly as if the fact were written on the ceiling: The “nonprofit” that I was leaving hundreds of millions to was not my destiny. I needed to change my will. Maybe it was too late. But I still didn’t have a better candidate.
I wanted to doze off, but I was afraid to sleep—afraid of the flailing, kicking, choking battleground that sleep has become as I act out my nightmares in full mobility. Afraid that I might not be able to sleep. Afraid of the crippling fatigue that comes when I can’t. Afraid of what nightmares I might have when sleep stops and I’m awake again.
So I just lay there, looking up at the high slanted ceiling, its long slats of tongue-and-groove red cedar. I was grateful for the apathy that pinned me, lost, at the bottom of a bottomless minute.
A motion out the side of my left eye announced an invasion. No matter how often my hallucinations have hit over the last few months, they always startle me. I jerked when, from stage left, a white and orange clownfish half the length of my hand swam into view, followed by another. From the right came a small school of regal tangs, their tails an insane shade of canary-yellow.
The dorsal regions of the flattened tangs were swirled with mysterious dark patches that looked like Hebrew letters written by a moving finger. The stripes on the clownfish, too, seemed legible. The clownfish and the tangs swam together in the space between my face and the ceiling, and the markings on their sides as they flippered back and forth formed sentences and paragraphs blinking too quickly for me to read. Soon they were joined by a troop of languid butterflyfish, whose dot-dash markings along their sides translated all the schooling scripture into long strings of Morse.
Other fish swam up in formations. Lemonpeels, flame angels, Picasso triggerfish: the colors were like an acid trip. The shapes were even stranger: spadefish and boxfish and pufferfish. The tweezer beaks of forceps fish, their mouths as long as the rest of their bodies. The massive, bulging foreheads of Napoleon wrasses. Longfin bannerfish, trailing the pennants of their dorsal fins for another full body length behind them.
It wasn’t me that was hallucinating; it was this delirious planet.
I lay there on the bottom of a watery atmosphere, looking upward into the greatest aquarium a boy could hope to visit. The teeming color-fields of fish made their own ecstasy. I wondered where they could be coming from, in all their sharp and accurate detail. I couldn’t figure out how I knew their names. Then I remembered.
Something incredible was happening. The disease that was running amok inside me—tearing out my cabling and leaving craters all over my brain—had cut a channel through to the center of my self where its ten-year-old founder still lived. The boy who once could breathe underwater was taking charge of the show again.
The whirlpool of bodies danced to the rhythms of a beatbox I couldn’t hear. Then, in one wrench of the kaleidoscope, all the shocks of color and strange silhouettes cleaved down the middle and swam offstage left and right, beyond the reach of my sight. That’s when the hammerheads arrived.
There must have been scores of them—more than I could count. I looked up at their bellies as they swam above me. Against the cedar ceiling, their tapered bodies looked like a Japanese ink animation. The long planks of their heads—eyes far out on each tip of the weird spatulate electromagnetic scanners—matched the large pelvic fins and turned their shadows into a patriarchal cross.
Then the hammerheads gave way to even larger creatures. The first dark disk came from behind my head. It felt as if Planet Earth were being invaded by aliens whose nature was built on a dream. A giant oceangoing manta ray was flying through an ocean of atmosphere across the cathedral ceiling of my upstairs bedroom. Its long, whiplike tail and flapping wings, the eerie cephalic lobes held out like scoops in front of its gaping mouth: the beast flew in the empty space above my head until, just before passing through the slats of the slanted ceiling, it reared back and did an Immelmann.
The look of that ballet as it passed through the wall and vanished was too much for my pockmarked brain. The vision of it wrung me out, and I began shaking. I thought I might lose control of my bowels. But the only thing to tear out of my dysfunctional body was a weak cry of amazement. In that moment, all the chaotic buildup of rogue alpha-synuclein proteins that was wrecking my brain felt worth that glimpse. I was a ten-year-old oceanographer who had taken a wrong turn. And in that instant, I remembered the life I was supposed to have led.
People around the world follow the first solo crossing of half the Pacific by a man who doesn’t know how to use a compass or steer a ship’s wheel. Over the course of several days, the fifty-four-foot, one-hundred-million-dollar yacht Children of Men makes its slow, automated way from harbor in San Francisco to the fringes of the raised atoll of Makatea. And on that island, people tune in to the journey in a mix of excitement and dread. History is coming for them, again.
“WHY IS IT ALWAYS the machine that sends out the reports?” Didier Turi asks. “The man himself never says a thing. All those days, and not a peep out of him! It’s always the artificial captain.”
“Showmanship,” Manutahi Roa explains. “The journey’s whole gimmick. ‘No human lifted a finger over this entire journey.’ ”
“The machine is doing everything? He just sits on deck, looking at the waves?”
“Just a passenger, yes.”
The mayor can’t accept this. His ancestors crossed the Pacific without an instrument more powerful than their hollowed-out canoes. Their brains knew all the ways of water and stars. They memorized features, sought out transits, watched bubbles and ripples, mapped out and calculated angles in their heads. Now humans can sit on the deck while boats pilot themselves and talk to satellites that measure the rise and fall of sea levels down to single centimeters.
All that in only three thousand years. There are stands of black corals as old as that, and individual glass sponges four or five times older.
RAFI AND AFA, HUNTING CRABS by headlamp and starlight. They’ve climbed to the island’s crown, where the mines scar the top of the mesa. The boy is too young to be up here at night. The carved-up paths of friable stone between the pits are no wider than the boy’s tiny feet. One bad step and he falls headlong to his death. But this is the hour of crabs, and Rafi keeps the boy close and slow.
“Careful, fella! Small steps. They’re out there. You’ll find them.”
“I know, Papa.” The child shortens his stride again, almost comically, to prove how safe he can be.
Earlier that evening, Ina begged her husband to delay this rite of passage for another year or two. But boys even younger than Afa have made their first hunts and come home safely, with sacks full of crustaceans. And one arched eyebrow from her husband reminded her of the question hanging over all their heads: What kind of Makatea will there be, in another year?
From a rise on the top of the island, father and son look out on black ocean in every direction. The boy has never known any world map but this. The entire universe of an island child, empty of all but a handful of lights on craft too small and far away to reveal their silhouettes. But beneath the blackness, invisible: all the experiments of life go on for miles downward.
For how long? Rafi thinks. He has heard it from the Canadian: Ten billion creatures dead on one small stretch of beach near Vancouver this summer alone. The Caribbean, a hot tub. Sharks, turtles, and seabirds starting to swim in circles. The last spiral that the myths talk about is here.
And, of course, the billionaire friend of his youth wants the tallest raised atoll in the central Pacific, for when all the others have been submerged.
One of those lights on the horizon is getting brighter against the black. Rafi points to it. He lifts his son off the ground for a better look.
“Is it him?”
Rafi sets the child down. “It must be.”
“What will he do to us? Dad? Dad?”
The father looks out across the endless water, the Pacific gyre moving heat around from the equator to the poles, the largest cog in the Earth’s relentless engine. He hears his own father still saying, The water belongs to nobody. It’s no-man’s-land. Anytime you need it, it’s there.
Then he remembers everything. How for a little while he and his friend kept each other safe and well and free.
“Papa? What did you do to him?”
There must be an answer to that question. One as simple as what really happened.
“I stopped trusting him.”
“And that hurt him? And now he wants to hurt you back?”
“He wants something. I don’t know what he wants.”
“Are you scared of him? Will he do bad things? But he’s building a hospital, right?”
Rafi Young cups his hand on his son’s head. “Don’t worry. He can’t hurt us. He can’t do anything bad to Makatea.”
Even as his conscience buckles under the weight of the lie, his son calls out in English: “Dad! Look!”
A crazy chitinous sci-fi monster speckled in burgundy and cobalt-blue, its claws two feet across, its clacking legs climbing up the trunk of a coconut palm. Crab: that form that evolution has reinvented at least five separate times. Afa rushes to the beast as if it might fly away.
“Afa, stop! Careful. Remember the training.”
The boy slows and reaches out two cunning hands. He snatches the crab along both sides of the upper thorax, where the curved claws can’t bend backward and break his fingers. The father rushes to assist. He binds the pincers in rubber bands and ties the flailing arms in pandanus-leaf twine.
